TechX7

Top foundries are advancing at incredible speeds in their never-ending drive to increase the speed, performance, and efficiency of smartphone processors. Only this year will TSMC, the world’s leading foundry, begin mass manufacturing of 2nm chips. The Taiwanese business plans to start mass producing 1.6nm circuits next year. As the number of process nodes decreases, the size of the transistors inside these devices shrinks, allowing more transistors to be shoehorned inside them.

This is significant because smaller transistors allow more to fit into a given area of the chip. This statistic, known as transistor density, often increases as the manufacturing node decreases. A chip’s transistor count is especially crucial since the more transistors there are, the more powerful and energy-efficient these semiconductors are. Consider the tremendous decline in process nodes that we have experienced in recent years.

For example, in 2019 the iPhone 11 series was powered by the 7nm A13 Bionic application processor (AP) with 8.5 billion transistors. This past September, the iPhone 16 Pro Max was unveiled with the 3nm A18 Pro AP beneath the hood. Although Apple never disclosed the chipset’s transistor count, given that the A17 Pro has 19 billion transistors, the component probably contains more than 20 billion transistors.

TSMC is on a roll, having lately posted fourth-quarter revenue of $26.88 billion, up 37% year on year. TSMC’s “smartphone seasonality” will result in a sequential fall in its top line in Q1 2025, despite an annual increase in first quarter gross of 34.7%.

With its 2nm chip manufacturing, TSMC will begin employing Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistors, which use vertically stacked horizontal nanosheets to allow the gate to cover all four sides of the channel, avoiding current leakage and increasing driving current. As a result, processors perform better while using less energy. When TSMC begins manufacturing of 1.6nm devices, it will include backside power delivery (BPD). BPD relocates power delivery from the front of a silicon wafer, where it leaves less room for transistors, to the rear, where it is unhindered by other lines.

To demonstrate how far we’ve come, the original iPhone, released in 2007, used a chip built on the 90nm process node. The upcoming iPhone 17 series, due to be launched this September, will be powered by the 3nm A19 and A19 Pro APs, which will be made using TSMC’s third-generation 3nm node (N3P). As a result, Apple expects to introduce the first iPhone to run on 2nm silicon with the 2026 iPhone 18 series.

In the meanwhile, TSMC claims that 1.6nm chips will provide an 8% to 10% increase in speed at the same power level as the 2nm node. We will have to wait and watch when the first iPhone with a 1.6nm AP will be released.